Status
Checked out
Publication
Dey Street Books (2015), Hardcover, 288 pages
Description
Biography & Autobiography. Performing Arts. Nonfiction. HTML: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth, fashion icon, and role model for a generation of women, now tells her story�??a memoir of life as an artist, of music, marriage, motherhood, independence, and as one of the first women of rock and roll, written with the lyricism and haunting beauty of Patti Smith's Just Kids. Often described as aloof, Kim Gordon opens up as never before in Girl in a Band. Telling the story of her family, growing up in California in the '60s and '70s, her life in visual art, her move to New York City, the men in her life, her marriage, her relationship with her daughter, her music, and her band, Girl in a Band is a rich and beautifully written memoir. Gordon takes us back to the lost New York of the 1980s and '90s that gave rise to Sonic Youth, and the Alternative revolution in popular music. The band helped build a vocabulary of music�??paving the way for Nirvana, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins and many other acts. But at its core, Girl in a Band examines the route from girl to woman in uncharted territory, music, art career, what partnership means�??and what happens when that identity dissolves. Evocative and edgy, filled with the sights and sounds of a changing world and a transformative life, Girl in a Band is the fascinating chronicle of a remarkable journey and an extraordinary art… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member lisapeet
Good, though not moving... and it felt a little incomplete, somehow. Which I know is the nature of a memoir if one isn't dead yet, but somehow Gordon feels like she's still got a lot more stuff to settle up. It's a panoramic book, not a reflective book. But still interesting, anecdotally and all,
Needless to say, I loved all the old 1980s downtown NYC stuff—it sent me off to Google every few pages to see whatever happened to so-and-so. Plus she gets major points for calling Billy Corgan a crybaby.
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and a fun read. Needless to say, I loved all the old 1980s downtown NYC stuff—it sent me off to Google every few pages to see whatever happened to so-and-so. Plus she gets major points for calling Billy Corgan a crybaby.
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LibraryThing member Narshkite
A wonderful reminiscence of growing up in a very particular time, coming of age in a fairly alien (and pretentious) 70's/80's New York art world, and navigating a job, a marriage and motherhood and other aspects of adult life. I cannot recommend this enough to those who love Sonic Youth and/or have
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a connection to the 70's/80's New York scene. I fit into both of those groups and loved the book. As a side note, though brutally honest, Kim takes a hatchet to no one other than the woman for whom Thurston left her (Eva Prinz, though she is not named in the book), and Courtney Love. The blaming the other woman thing sort of bothered me. It was Thurston who cheated on her, and the other woman owed her nothing. I will give Kim the benefit of the doubt and assume the woman is the psycho bitch Kim portrays, but still this was sort of uncool. Thurston is portrayed as helpless to repel EP's manipulation and sexual charms, and that is a pretty anti-feminist POV for a respected feminist. It also allows Thurston to come of as something of a victim, which he is not. He was a man in his 50's who made a decision. Not vilifying him, just saying he is responsible for his own actions. As for Courtney, wow does Kim hate her! She thoroughly excoriates Love (while allowing as an aside that Courtney is likely mentally ill) and essentially blames Courtney for Kurt Cobain's demise, insinuating that she found someone sad, lost, weak, and self-injurious and set herself to breaking down anything in him that was keeping him alive. She also says that Courtney was a terrible mother. All of this is probably true, but it was surprising how much space Kim spent in this fairly short memoir to tearing down Love. Overall though a fascinating and frank look at aspects of one very interesting woman's life. Show Less
LibraryThing member Big_Bang_Gorilla
Paul Westerberg once commented that there would never be a Replacements reunion because whenever he approached Chris Mars about doing one, he acted as though someone wanted him to take up a paper route he had when he was a kid. And that's the problem with this memoir by Sonic Youth co-founder
That leaves a scant hundred pages or so about Sonic Youth, and, even that is further squeezed with digressions about her life as artist, designer, and fashionista. And it must be said that some of her enthusiasms are truly horrifying; I have scant empathy for the sort of intellectual asceticism which sends somebody into paeans for the great sublimity of the art of The Carpenters. It must be said that none of this is completely uninteresting, and Gordon has a better claim than most to be accomplished in several fields, but it's difficult to imagine that many readers are going to find themselves highly engaged with this book start to finish.
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Gordon. The first third of the book deals with her unhappy childhood, bedeviled by her mentally ill brother, and her years as an art scenester in NYC during the seventies. The last third of the book narrates her life as a mom, the deterioration and dissolution of her marriage to creative partner Thurston Moore and, yes, her reemergence as an art scenester in the NYC of the teens.That leaves a scant hundred pages or so about Sonic Youth, and, even that is further squeezed with digressions about her life as artist, designer, and fashionista. And it must be said that some of her enthusiasms are truly horrifying; I have scant empathy for the sort of intellectual asceticism which sends somebody into paeans for the great sublimity of the art of The Carpenters. It must be said that none of this is completely uninteresting, and Gordon has a better claim than most to be accomplished in several fields, but it's difficult to imagine that many readers are going to find themselves highly engaged with this book start to finish.
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LibraryThing member pivic
While this book is similar to that which Gordon previously has published, by means of mentioning art, dropping names and quickly going over events and people, this book has something special in that she goes through her marriage breaking apart due to her former husband's infidelity; she writes
One morning I got up to go to yoga. Thurston was still asleep, and I looked down at his cell. It was then that I saw her texts about their wonderful weekend together, about how much she loved him, and his writing the same things back. It was like a nightmare you don’t ever wake up from. At yoga class I was trembling, and when I came home I confronted him. At first he denied it but I told him I had seen the texts—just like in the movies, only this was painfully real. Thurston claimed that he wanted to break it off. He claimed he wanted to come back to our family. In time I found the e-mails and videos from her on Thurston’s laptop, and the hundreds of text messages between the two of them proudly displayed on our monthly cell phone bill. When I confronted Thurston again, he denied it, then admitted it, then promised things were all over between them. It was a pattern that would happen over and over again. I wanted to believe him. I understood that the cigarettes were a mark of some secrecy between them, a ritual and a taboo that could only happen outside the home when no one else was around.
She writes about Sonic Youth's last gig ever at the very start of the book, which is very heartfelt and a quite horrid read, but really only when framed by the last part of the book, where she pores through the motions of what happened; how Thurston Moore lied to Kim Gordon and everything they had stopped, but started living again (according to him), yet turned out as a hoax.
She tells of her growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic brother who nobody seemed to get was just that, during the psychedelia-lovin' American 1960s.
But she quickly got into art, both the visual side and the musical.
For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless. I wrote an article for Artforum in the mideighties that had a line in it that the rock critic Greil Marcus quoted a lot: “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.” Meaning, the higher the chance you can fall down in public, the more value the culture places on what you do. Unlike, say, a writer or a painter, when you’re onstage you can’t hide from other people, or from yourself either. I’ve spent a lot of time in Berlin, and the Germans have all these great words with multiple meanings inside them. A few visits ago, I came across one of those words, Maskenfreiheit. It means “the freedom conferred by masks.”
She writes plainly lovely sometimes, in amidst all of the namedropping and hurt:
WRITING ABOUT NEW YORK is hard. Not because memories intersect and overlap, because of course they do. Not because incidents and times mix with others, because that happens too. Not because I didn’t fall in love with New York, because even though I was lonely and poor, no place had ever made me feel more at home. It is because knowing what I know now, it’s hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.
On thinking back when she met Moore, before 27 years of marriage ended:
Today, when I think back on the early days and months of Thurston’s and my relationship, I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are. It’s made me question my whole life and all my other relationships. Why did I trust him, or assume I knew anything at all about him? Maybe I imposed on Thurston a dream, a fantasy. When I look back at old photos of us, I have to believe we were happy, at least as happy as any two creative people who are stressed out with commitments and fears about the future and what’s next, and about their own ideas and inner demons, ever can be.
And quoting a friend on what being in a band is not:
As J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. liked to say when asked about being in a band, “It’s not fun. It’s not about having fun.”
What is fun, however, is mainly when Gordon writes about the band creating stuff:
Gary Gersh, our A&R guy at Geffen, was disappointed when we chose a black-and-white Raymond Pettibon drawing for the cover of Goo. I’m sure he was hoping for a glamorous picture of the band, something very of the moment, with me front and center. Raymond’s drawings had been slapped on record covers for many bands on the SST label, especially Black Flag’s. We loved Ray’s zines and drawings and in the mideighties I had written about his work in Artforum; the black-and-white cover was based on the couple in Terrence Malick’s film Badlands, while the inside was colorful, a riot of faux-glam goofiness.
..and:
In the video for “100%” I wore a bootleg Rolling Stones shirt that said “Eat Me.” As a result, MTV, which showed any number of videos of naked women grinding away, was reluctant to run ours. They felt my shirt sent a bad message to viewers. After the band signed with Geffen, a story came out about an executive there who had sexually harassed his secretary. That was the inspiration for “Swimsuit Issue.” I found it strange that Geffen, like a lot of companies, had a “Secretary’s Day,” but secretaries never seemed to get promoted to anything above that level. The song was meant to spotlight that hypocrisy.
And Moore. Over and over:
Later someone showed me a comment posted on the Sonic Youth website. “She looks like a hot little number,” a fan wrote in. He must have seen a photo of the two of them on some website, or picked up on the gossip going around. He added, “Kim beware, men are pigs after all and more affairs happen at work than any other arena.” Finally, the fan wrote, in a catchphrase he took from The Dark Knight, the second of director Christopher Nolan’s three Batman movies, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” A few months later, around Coco’s seventeenth birthday, I found out Thurston had seen her again, at a concert he played in Europe, though he had promised his therapist that if she showed up again or contacted him, he would call his doctor and tell me, too. He did neither. I went back to checking his e-mail, where I found several short, porno-like videos that she had sent him. Thurston denied ever responding to them, but sometime after that I found an e-mail he’d drafted to her with a photo of him attached. Maybe he didn’t send it because his vanity got the better of him, or maybe he wanted me to find it. I asked him to move out of the house. The official announcement of our breakup was timed so we could sit down and tell Coco before the news hit the Internet and strangers started discussing our lives. The web is trouble enough, especially when you’re in your senior year of high school and stressed out about college. Even though Thurston and I had separated in August, so far we hadn’t made any public statements, but people were starting to speculate. It didn’t stop Coco from being angry with me for not telling her sooner. Kids believe everything is a family matter and that they should have an equal vote or some control over everything that goes on in their family’s lives. And being a teenager makes everyone doubly self-conscious. We had already more than ruined her senior year of high school. As she had told us, we couldn’t possibly know what it was like to have us for parents. I did feel some compassion for Thurston, and I still do. I was sorry for the way he had lost his marriage, his band, his daughter, his family, our life together—and himself. But that is a lot different from forgiveness.
All in all: a trip through music and love and disaster and building yourself back together; it's an honest trip, but should have been a little more constrained and without all of that name-dropping, but then again, it wouldn't have been Moore's story without that.
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about it in a very going through the motions way, even when describing her own feelings.One morning I got up to go to yoga. Thurston was still asleep, and I looked down at his cell. It was then that I saw her texts about their wonderful weekend together, about how much she loved him, and his writing the same things back. It was like a nightmare you don’t ever wake up from. At yoga class I was trembling, and when I came home I confronted him. At first he denied it but I told him I had seen the texts—just like in the movies, only this was painfully real. Thurston claimed that he wanted to break it off. He claimed he wanted to come back to our family. In time I found the e-mails and videos from her on Thurston’s laptop, and the hundreds of text messages between the two of them proudly displayed on our monthly cell phone bill. When I confronted Thurston again, he denied it, then admitted it, then promised things were all over between them. It was a pattern that would happen over and over again. I wanted to believe him. I understood that the cigarettes were a mark of some secrecy between them, a ritual and a taboo that could only happen outside the home when no one else was around.
She writes about Sonic Youth's last gig ever at the very start of the book, which is very heartfelt and a quite horrid read, but really only when framed by the last part of the book, where she pores through the motions of what happened; how Thurston Moore lied to Kim Gordon and everything they had stopped, but started living again (according to him), yet turned out as a hoax.
She tells of her growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic brother who nobody seemed to get was just that, during the psychedelia-lovin' American 1960s.
But she quickly got into art, both the visual side and the musical.
For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless. I wrote an article for Artforum in the mideighties that had a line in it that the rock critic Greil Marcus quoted a lot: “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.” Meaning, the higher the chance you can fall down in public, the more value the culture places on what you do. Unlike, say, a writer or a painter, when you’re onstage you can’t hide from other people, or from yourself either. I’ve spent a lot of time in Berlin, and the Germans have all these great words with multiple meanings inside them. A few visits ago, I came across one of those words, Maskenfreiheit. It means “the freedom conferred by masks.”
She writes plainly lovely sometimes, in amidst all of the namedropping and hurt:
WRITING ABOUT NEW YORK is hard. Not because memories intersect and overlap, because of course they do. Not because incidents and times mix with others, because that happens too. Not because I didn’t fall in love with New York, because even though I was lonely and poor, no place had ever made me feel more at home. It is because knowing what I know now, it’s hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.
On thinking back when she met Moore, before 27 years of marriage ended:
Today, when I think back on the early days and months of Thurston’s and my relationship, I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are. It’s made me question my whole life and all my other relationships. Why did I trust him, or assume I knew anything at all about him? Maybe I imposed on Thurston a dream, a fantasy. When I look back at old photos of us, I have to believe we were happy, at least as happy as any two creative people who are stressed out with commitments and fears about the future and what’s next, and about their own ideas and inner demons, ever can be.
And quoting a friend on what being in a band is not:
As J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. liked to say when asked about being in a band, “It’s not fun. It’s not about having fun.”
What is fun, however, is mainly when Gordon writes about the band creating stuff:
Gary Gersh, our A&R guy at Geffen, was disappointed when we chose a black-and-white Raymond Pettibon drawing for the cover of Goo. I’m sure he was hoping for a glamorous picture of the band, something very of the moment, with me front and center. Raymond’s drawings had been slapped on record covers for many bands on the SST label, especially Black Flag’s. We loved Ray’s zines and drawings and in the mideighties I had written about his work in Artforum; the black-and-white cover was based on the couple in Terrence Malick’s film Badlands, while the inside was colorful, a riot of faux-glam goofiness.
..and:
In the video for “100%” I wore a bootleg Rolling Stones shirt that said “Eat Me.” As a result, MTV, which showed any number of videos of naked women grinding away, was reluctant to run ours. They felt my shirt sent a bad message to viewers. After the band signed with Geffen, a story came out about an executive there who had sexually harassed his secretary. That was the inspiration for “Swimsuit Issue.” I found it strange that Geffen, like a lot of companies, had a “Secretary’s Day,” but secretaries never seemed to get promoted to anything above that level. The song was meant to spotlight that hypocrisy.
And Moore. Over and over:
Later someone showed me a comment posted on the Sonic Youth website. “She looks like a hot little number,” a fan wrote in. He must have seen a photo of the two of them on some website, or picked up on the gossip going around. He added, “Kim beware, men are pigs after all and more affairs happen at work than any other arena.” Finally, the fan wrote, in a catchphrase he took from The Dark Knight, the second of director Christopher Nolan’s three Batman movies, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” A few months later, around Coco’s seventeenth birthday, I found out Thurston had seen her again, at a concert he played in Europe, though he had promised his therapist that if she showed up again or contacted him, he would call his doctor and tell me, too. He did neither. I went back to checking his e-mail, where I found several short, porno-like videos that she had sent him. Thurston denied ever responding to them, but sometime after that I found an e-mail he’d drafted to her with a photo of him attached. Maybe he didn’t send it because his vanity got the better of him, or maybe he wanted me to find it. I asked him to move out of the house. The official announcement of our breakup was timed so we could sit down and tell Coco before the news hit the Internet and strangers started discussing our lives. The web is trouble enough, especially when you’re in your senior year of high school and stressed out about college. Even though Thurston and I had separated in August, so far we hadn’t made any public statements, but people were starting to speculate. It didn’t stop Coco from being angry with me for not telling her sooner. Kids believe everything is a family matter and that they should have an equal vote or some control over everything that goes on in their family’s lives. And being a teenager makes everyone doubly self-conscious. We had already more than ruined her senior year of high school. As she had told us, we couldn’t possibly know what it was like to have us for parents. I did feel some compassion for Thurston, and I still do. I was sorry for the way he had lost his marriage, his band, his daughter, his family, our life together—and himself. But that is a lot different from forgiveness.
All in all: a trip through music and love and disaster and building yourself back together; it's an honest trip, but should have been a little more constrained and without all of that name-dropping, but then again, it wouldn't have been Moore's story without that.
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LibraryThing member AHS-Wolfy
Autobiography that starts with the break-up of both her marriage and the band she was an integral part of for 30 years before retreating to events of her childhood and growing up and on to the rest of the story of her life. Plenty of name-dropping with collaborations both in her artwork and her
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music but the narrative is fairly devoid of emotion. I think I was just hoping for a little more. Show Less
LibraryThing member froxgirl
Title says it all. The modest lead singer for the 90’s band Sonic Youth has written a doggedly down-to-earth narrative of how she fell in with the stereotypical art school crowd (like The Beatles, as she reminds us) and met husband-to-be and guitarist Thurston Moore in the East Village. Sonic
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Youth was the peer of New Wave, No Wave, Punk, and Grunge bands - true intersectionality with the white music world. Much of her story is taken up with her marriage and its unraveling. It’s a mildly entertaining autobiography or maybe more, depending on if you loved the band. Show Less
LibraryThing member bassocantor
GIRL IN A BAND is a complicated book about a supremely creative, intelligent musician and artist. The author’s life has not been a simple one, nor is this book a trivial read. The author comes across as actually a very modest person. For instance, “I’ve never thought of myself as a singer
GIRL IN A BAND is not just about the author's experience as a musician; it's also about her experience as an artist. I did not know, for example, that Kim actually graduated from one of the most well known schools of art in the United States, Otis. It had a huge impact on Kim: “Otis changed my life.” Kim recalls that she became very close to John Knight, who became her first artistic mentor. John had been kicked out of Otis because he used the school’s hedges to form a sculpture. Apparently the school establishment was not too pleased with his choice of media. John taught a seminar, attended by Kim, which would meet in different houses or apartments. “John Knight taught me that anything - a car, a house, a long- could be seen and talked about in aesthetic terms. He introduced me to conceptual art, showed me how all art derives from an idea.”
One interesting early section is her experience at the “UCLA Lab School.” The teacher wanted to impress upon the students the significance of Dana Point Harbor. Named, of course, after Richard Henry Dana, author of the classic, “Two Years before the Mast.” Kim says, “Our teacher drove us down to Dana Point, in Orange County, where we tossed our cow hides down on the beach for imaginary incoming boats, copying what the early traders must have done.”
Kim lived in a lot of different places - some of them not very nice or perhaps not even safe. When she stayed at Venice, she recalls that it was a “rough, scary place. One street would be fine but a block away with a potential drug war zone. I live on one of the rotten streets.” She recounts one scary experience when a deranged-looking individual approached them holding a big butcher knife. He was obviously high, and they were able to run into their house and lock the door.
A frightful experience in a car crash enabled the author to move to New York City. It was the money from an insurance settlement. She explained that she had not been seriously hurt but nonetheless got a $10,000 check from the insurance company. She describes New York as a crazy place “a jumble, all colors, shapes, angles, altitudes.” Even though she didn't really know what she was doing, she confesses, she got a job as a receptionist in an art gallery in Soho. She describes herself as “the least qualified person ever to hold out a part time receptionist job.” Years later she learned that one of the artists in the gallery had remarked that she had indeed been the worst reception as he had ever seen.
One of the most fascinating sections in the book is where the author describes her first performance on stage in front of a live audience. Their new small girl band was called "Introjection." Kim played the guitar, another girl played the drums, and the third girl played bass. The performance was terrible and their sponsor was very disappointed in the in the night's performance. Nevertheless, Kim had experienced something new and wonderful: “At the same time I felt as if something new was lodged in my brain. Mixed in with the nerves was another sensation, as if I were a kid on a high altitude ride I never had a ticket to go on before.” Despite this, the band soon disbanded.
Kim explains that there wasn't just one single point of time where Sonic Youth came into being. “There were so many moments of formation for Sonic Youth; it's hard to pinpoint one. In the beginning, the band was just Thurston, Lee Renaldo and me, with different drummer's entering and exiting like pedestrians stopping to stare briefly at a shop window. We had many different names before deciding on Sonic Youth: Male Bonding, Red Milk, and the Arcadians.” Of course none of them had much experience with a band. She admits, “We were a baby band, and as such, had no idea what we were doing.”
Kim explains that she was not at all easy being on stage: “When I first began playing on stage, I was pretty self conscious. I was just trying to hold my own with the bass guitar, hoping the strings wouldn't snap that the audience would have a good experience.”
Sonic Youth had a chance to actually open for a Neil Young tour. Ironically, many in the crowd—especially legions of hippies, were very loyal to Neil Young, but really detested Sonic Youth. In some of these performances, Kim describes an agonizing long twenty minutes set, playing to empty seats right in front of the band. She looks back on tour with Neil Young as a long grueling time—an “ocean of endless arena locker rooms.” Sonic Youth did not go over too many fans, she recalls. Nonetheless, all of a sudden the band’s profile rose, and suddenly influential magazines were talking and writing about the new band.
The end of the book describes the sad break up with Thurston. Honestly, I sort of wish this section had not even been in the book. It's painful to read about her experience discovering love messages texted back and forth to and from Thurston.Yet, of course, this is part of her story and so I see how it must be included to make this story complete.
Towards the end of the book, Kim reminisces on the decade of the sixties: “The 1960's were so beloved. More than any other decade, they embodied the idea that an individual could find an identity and a music movement.” Then, later in the late 1960's, the movement began to emphasize more about money, and less about idealism: “The crack of idealism between the performer and the audience signaled the end of the 1960’s.”
Of course, Kim has always been a visual artist as well as a performing artist. She notes how she recently joined the “303 Gallery” in New York. Even though she tries to sometimes get away from performing, she admits that “music keeps pulling me back in.”
GIRL IN A BAND is a wonderful, insightful tail of a very gifted artist and performer. This is not a trivial read; I think most readers will want to read this book slowly, or perhaps read it once and then come back and read the whole thing all over again.
In a moment of introspection, Kim explains that she initially joined a band so that she could be inside what she calls the “male dynamic, not staring into a closed window but looking out.” And, “Guys playing music. I loved music. I wanted to push up close to whatever it was been felt when they were together on stage on stage - to try to ink in that invisible thing.”
Review copy courtesy of Edelweiss
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with a good voice, or even as a musician. I'm able to put myself out there by feeling as though I'm jumping off a cliff.” She notes that Neil Young once said that “It's more about having an authentic voice than a good voice.”GIRL IN A BAND is not just about the author's experience as a musician; it's also about her experience as an artist. I did not know, for example, that Kim actually graduated from one of the most well known schools of art in the United States, Otis. It had a huge impact on Kim: “Otis changed my life.” Kim recalls that she became very close to John Knight, who became her first artistic mentor. John had been kicked out of Otis because he used the school’s hedges to form a sculpture. Apparently the school establishment was not too pleased with his choice of media. John taught a seminar, attended by Kim, which would meet in different houses or apartments. “John Knight taught me that anything - a car, a house, a long- could be seen and talked about in aesthetic terms. He introduced me to conceptual art, showed me how all art derives from an idea.”
One interesting early section is her experience at the “UCLA Lab School.” The teacher wanted to impress upon the students the significance of Dana Point Harbor. Named, of course, after Richard Henry Dana, author of the classic, “Two Years before the Mast.” Kim says, “Our teacher drove us down to Dana Point, in Orange County, where we tossed our cow hides down on the beach for imaginary incoming boats, copying what the early traders must have done.”
Kim lived in a lot of different places - some of them not very nice or perhaps not even safe. When she stayed at Venice, she recalls that it was a “rough, scary place. One street would be fine but a block away with a potential drug war zone. I live on one of the rotten streets.” She recounts one scary experience when a deranged-looking individual approached them holding a big butcher knife. He was obviously high, and they were able to run into their house and lock the door.
A frightful experience in a car crash enabled the author to move to New York City. It was the money from an insurance settlement. She explained that she had not been seriously hurt but nonetheless got a $10,000 check from the insurance company. She describes New York as a crazy place “a jumble, all colors, shapes, angles, altitudes.” Even though she didn't really know what she was doing, she confesses, she got a job as a receptionist in an art gallery in Soho. She describes herself as “the least qualified person ever to hold out a part time receptionist job.” Years later she learned that one of the artists in the gallery had remarked that she had indeed been the worst reception as he had ever seen.
One of the most fascinating sections in the book is where the author describes her first performance on stage in front of a live audience. Their new small girl band was called "Introjection." Kim played the guitar, another girl played the drums, and the third girl played bass. The performance was terrible and their sponsor was very disappointed in the in the night's performance. Nevertheless, Kim had experienced something new and wonderful: “At the same time I felt as if something new was lodged in my brain. Mixed in with the nerves was another sensation, as if I were a kid on a high altitude ride I never had a ticket to go on before.” Despite this, the band soon disbanded.
Kim explains that there wasn't just one single point of time where Sonic Youth came into being. “There were so many moments of formation for Sonic Youth; it's hard to pinpoint one. In the beginning, the band was just Thurston, Lee Renaldo and me, with different drummer's entering and exiting like pedestrians stopping to stare briefly at a shop window. We had many different names before deciding on Sonic Youth: Male Bonding, Red Milk, and the Arcadians.” Of course none of them had much experience with a band. She admits, “We were a baby band, and as such, had no idea what we were doing.”
Kim explains that she was not at all easy being on stage: “When I first began playing on stage, I was pretty self conscious. I was just trying to hold my own with the bass guitar, hoping the strings wouldn't snap that the audience would have a good experience.”
Sonic Youth had a chance to actually open for a Neil Young tour. Ironically, many in the crowd—especially legions of hippies, were very loyal to Neil Young, but really detested Sonic Youth. In some of these performances, Kim describes an agonizing long twenty minutes set, playing to empty seats right in front of the band. She looks back on tour with Neil Young as a long grueling time—an “ocean of endless arena locker rooms.” Sonic Youth did not go over too many fans, she recalls. Nonetheless, all of a sudden the band’s profile rose, and suddenly influential magazines were talking and writing about the new band.
The end of the book describes the sad break up with Thurston. Honestly, I sort of wish this section had not even been in the book. It's painful to read about her experience discovering love messages texted back and forth to and from Thurston.Yet, of course, this is part of her story and so I see how it must be included to make this story complete.
Towards the end of the book, Kim reminisces on the decade of the sixties: “The 1960's were so beloved. More than any other decade, they embodied the idea that an individual could find an identity and a music movement.” Then, later in the late 1960's, the movement began to emphasize more about money, and less about idealism: “The crack of idealism between the performer and the audience signaled the end of the 1960’s.”
Of course, Kim has always been a visual artist as well as a performing artist. She notes how she recently joined the “303 Gallery” in New York. Even though she tries to sometimes get away from performing, she admits that “music keeps pulling me back in.”
GIRL IN A BAND is a wonderful, insightful tail of a very gifted artist and performer. This is not a trivial read; I think most readers will want to read this book slowly, or perhaps read it once and then come back and read the whole thing all over again.
In a moment of introspection, Kim explains that she initially joined a band so that she could be inside what she calls the “male dynamic, not staring into a closed window but looking out.” And, “Guys playing music. I loved music. I wanted to push up close to whatever it was been felt when they were together on stage on stage - to try to ink in that invisible thing.”
Review copy courtesy of Edelweiss
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LibraryThing member voracious
Kim Gordon's autobiography encompasses her childhood, her life as a visual artist, her longstanding career as the bass player for Sonic Youth, and her long marriage to Thurston Moore. I had met Kim once after Sonic Youth played with Redd Cross in Columbus, Ohio in the early 1990's and I thought she
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was very rude. However, I really enjoyed reading about her life and experiences in her book, which kind of explain how her distant and cold persona formed over the course of her early years. Although a lot of her book reviewed her inner thoughts about feminism, motherhood, the art in music, and the music which influenced Sonic Youth, I found the most interesting parts were when she described her relationships with other musicians and celebrities. I also enjoyed her descriptions of raising her daughter, Coco, who continually complained about having to rock star parents and how it influenced her social life. Although I still found Kim somewhat emotionally distant in her writing, I felt much closer to her as a person as she described her grief over Kurt Cobain's suicide and her interactions with Courtney Love. Overall, this is a fairly well-written book about someone I am glad I took the time to learn more about. I will definitely appreciate Sonic Youth's music more now that I have read this firsthand perspective. Show Less
LibraryThing member LamontCranston
I’d have liked to have read more about the 70s art scene and no wave, early sonic youth, free kitten, x-girl, juggling touring and music and art and raising a kid. All this just gets a few pages each and will have an allusion to what thurston did. And then the last 100 pages are what thurston did.
LibraryThing member Opinionated
For a girl who was in a band (Sonic Youth) for 30 years, she doesn't seem to have that much to say about it. Yes, the book opens with Sonic Youth playing their last ever gig and Kim Gordon's feelings of resentment to her husband, and bandmate, Thurston Moore, who had recently left her for another
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woman. But after that, she doesn't really spend more than 30 pages on the band. She has interesting things to say about her California childhood, the trauma she experienced at the hands of her mentally ill brother, and about how art helped to form her. But once she meets Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth is formed, we hear very little about their creative process or anything at all other than snippets about some of their tunes. Instead we get a lot interesting digressions on art, Kurt and Courtney (Courtney is given a kicking) and other topics. But not much about Sonic Youth - other than her lasting, and justifiable anger about her husband. Its interesting, but not exactly what I expected Show Less
LibraryThing member roniweb
This book was both a joy & painful to read, but that's what you get from an honest memoir I guess.
LibraryThing member J.E.Schier
INSPIRING MAKES ME WANT TO BE A BOY IN A BAND
she really puts herself out there
"to overcome my own hypersensitivity, i had no choice but to turn fearless"
great anecdotes about the million bands sonic youth floated around in new york etc
she really puts herself out there
"to overcome my own hypersensitivity, i had no choice but to turn fearless"
great anecdotes about the million bands sonic youth floated around in new york etc
Language
Original publication date
2015
Physical description
288 p.; 6 inches
ISBN
0062295896 / 9780062295897